5punk

I had a thought just now in the shower (yes, I work from home, I shower at weird times of the day). Religions as represented in most fantasy worlds, especially RPG fantasy worlds, are fuck all like how religion works in the real world.

In nearly every case, real world religion can be best described as believing in something whilst having no proof. Hell, most of the time there isn't even any evidence that wouldn't be thrown out of a court case or cause your scientific paper to be laughed out of the peer review process. In real world religion, one religion tends to believe that another religions god is either secretly evil or non-existent. Gods in real world religion are generally represented as all powerful immortals, whilst people are fragile meatbags that relatively speaking cant do shit.

Fantasy world religions, on the other hand, are cock all like this. There is often solid proof in the existence of fantasy gods, including in person appearances and reasonably common incidences of people who have god given super powers. Everyone pretty much agrees which gods are good and which are evil, and pretty much everyone agrees that they all exist, its just a question of which one you like more and want the favour of. Finally, although fantasy gods are represented similarly to real world gods, people can be lowly peasants, high level wizards or crazy potent liches wandering about eating powerful magical items. Its an analogue scale, rather than the real world binary situation, and with skill and luck someone can go from one end of it all the way up to the other.

This so far is all stuff I have moaned about before whilst talking about fantasy RPGs, because the silliness of how religion is represented in game sometimes gets in the way of my ability to empathise with characters. Why would anyone in D&D only worship one god when they know there are a whole bunch of them out there? Why would anyone worship an evil god, like, ever? What hasn't occurred to me before today is that there is something in the real world that closely matches how fantasy religion is handled. Its just not religion. Its politics.

We all know that politicians exist (unfortunately). Some of us will have met some of them. Some regular people even meet the PM or President sometimes, so arguing over whether one political party is "the one true party" would be silly. Instead, we argue about which one is best, and worship them with our votes. OK, so we don't all agree which ones are good and which are evil, but we do all largely agree how they are "aligned", its just more in terms of left and right. Some people are chosen by our political leaders and are given powers the rest of us don't have (although these tend to be more "policy making" and less "raising the dead"). Politicians are inarguably more powerful than the common man but, with skill and luck, any one of us could become an MP or equivalent and in theory we could even become the leader of a country. Its probably best if none of *us* do that.

The gods of D&D are not those worlds versions of Jehovah. They are not even Zeus. They are Ed Balls with immortality.

PS: Lets not get into a debate about real world religion though. The very fact that we even have those kind of debates just further proves my point: No one in D&D ever argued about whether religion causes wars. Of course it bloody does, when your god punched my god in the nose over a matter of spilled ambrosia.

I always figured the evil religions were more like cults.

I've always read these things to be along the lines of "I know all these other gods exist, but I prefer this particular one over all the others". I'm reading the Song of Fire and Ice/Game of Thrones books at the moment (tip: don't read them all back to back, it gets a bit tedious) and had similar thoughts to you. People have literally been brought back from the dead by emissaries of ones particular god, yet everyone still worships another bunch because there's still proof of their existence.

Maybe gods exist at a quantum level - they occupy the same space whilst at the same time being completely separate. I like this idea, and I'm going to think more on it.

Pratchett goes into this topic in one of the Discworld books (Small Gods?), and it basically boiled down to people choosing which god either matched their world view, or which one they thought would help them the most. That said, there were gods for everything, and just believing there was a god of something was enough to ensure there was actually a god of that thing.

I was going to write more but couldn't be arsed typing on a phone. Would the whole lot not be part of a pantheon? Especially considering people can't really dispute that any other gods exist.

I've tried a couple of slightly different approaches to gods in games myself. In one system religious characters gained extra protection from supernatural gribblies. I never specified whether it was from their god or merely their faith. I didn't really think it mattered - it was a contemporary setting (apart from the aforementioned supernatural stuff) so they were pretty much the same thing anyway. In another the characters play prophets in a world of dead gods, trying to restore faith in order to bring them back to life. The latter isn't any more life-like than any other fantasy setting, but I liked that it gave an excuse as to why the player characters are different.

Dog Pants wrote:Would the whole lot not be part of a pantheon?

Yeah, but in the real world a pantheon is specific to a religion. Its pretty much just Hindus that are polytheistic nowadays, but they believe in their collection of gods, the norse believed in thiers, the greek believed in theirs. I don't think there are any real world religions that believe *all* the gods are real, which is what is presented by games like D&D.

I think the thing that gets me about it is that there is no-one in D&D style fantasy worlds that are just flat out wrong in their beliefs. Some people might have the wrong idea about the nature of their gods, but that's as far as it goes. In the real world, assuming you subscribe to the normal way of thinking, only one belief system can be correct (for the sake of easy wordage I am treating atheism as a belief system). If only one belief system can be right, that means that most people believe something that just isn't true. Like, at all. That never really comes up in fantasy stories. They might think their god is awesome when he is actually a dick, or still be worshipping a god that died years ago or something, but there are never people praying to a god that doesn't exist and never has existed. Which either means all fantasy worlds actually run on the Pratchett/Discworld system or they are all kinda dumb.

There are many stories in the real world about Gods interacting directly with mortals, such as with the ancient Greeks. Those Gods were demonstrably real, as they often had half-God children with one mortal parent.
However I don't suppose anyone actually living throught thoses times saw any of the mythological events occur, they're just stories with a premise, as fantasy worlds are effectively based on a premise such as: magic exists.
It probably says more about all of the authors attitudes towards religions in general that none of the fantasy-world religions are particularly well-fleshed-out or believable. Real world religions exist for a number of reasons, but not least among them is to explain the unexplainable - but when magic is the macguffin and actual Gods come to visit, what is there left to believe in, to take on faith?

FatherJack wrote:That would be an ecumenical matter.

Fix'd.